You don’t need a parachute to jump from an aeroplane. You only need a parachute if you want to jump twice.

So says Alex Mandossian, known as the king of electronic marketing. He is the CEO of Heritage House Publishing and co-founder of MarketingOnline.com. By nature, someone like Alex would be a motivator and risk taker. What you’d expect to hear from him are countless quotes on moving-out-of-your-comfort-zone. And you’d be right, except for the twist he puts on the parachute that will keep you safe. His is no external parachute.

Alex says, “Like the defining moment when water turns into steam, the achiever’s physical, mental, emotional and even spiritual chemistry must change in order to carve the new path to positive and permanent change.”

So, how do you make this change? I’m sure you know countless people who keep doing all the right things, but don’t seem to get any of the results they want. According to Darren Hardy, author of ‘The Compound Effect’, most people who want to achieve new goals ask: “Okay, I have my goal; now what do I need to do to get it?”

Darren says it’s not a bad question, but it’s not the first question that needs to be addressed. The question we should be asking ourselves is: “Who do I need to become?”

Alex says that ‘being’ consistently causes more permanent change than ‘doing’ ever could. How to change your focus? According to Alex the answer is so simple that you’d probably roll your eyes and refuse to do it. It’s like this: Find a meaningful quote from a thought leader you admire; print out five copies of it; and stick them up wherever you spend time in your home.

“You see, making a positive and permanent change in any part of your life requires nothing more than practicing a small set of principles over a long period of time,” Alex says.

So, girlfriend, what would your ‘be quote’ be? The answer is important, because that is your internal parachute when you make the dive.

Mine is still Mahatma Gandhi’s: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In every moment you have a chance to make a choice to bring light into the world, says Madisyn Taylor.

Although practicing a set of principles can take a long time to become a habit, Madisyn says that our interpretation defines our experience and it can change in an instant. Surely you can remember a time when frustration that was based on a misunderstanding completely evaporated when your understanding changed?

It could be as immediate as that. “Our only true reality is the present moment, so rather than merely accepting that life is happening to us, we can harness the power of our thoughts to actively create a positive reality,” Madisyn writes.

She says that, to a certain degree, we all rely on other people’s accounts of reality. For example, we can’t all be molecular physicists, but we can benefit from their information about the nature of the universe.

Of course this input from experts is valuable, “but our own sense of the truth is ultimately the most important piece in processing the information we take in from external sources. In the end, we are the authorities in our own lives, and we have the final say on whether something generally held as true is true for us,” Madisyn writes.

All of us sometimes wish we could just let someone else decide for us what is real and true, but we can’t. This does not mean that we ignore the information we receive from outside sources, but that it’s up to us to decide whether we agree with its usefulness or not.

“Throughout the day, we can monitor our thoughts to catch ourselves in the middle of investing our energy elsewhere – such as into belief in limitations – and instead pull our focus back to the infinite possibilities of the present,” Madisyn says.

We have to stop judging every situation by its safety and security potential. All life is an experiment, but girlfriend, you really do need your parachute to steer you towards a safe landing in territory where the natives are friendly, or at least then not downright dangerous.